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The creeping IT apocalypse

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Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#251

Post by flukus »

MRD85 wrote: post #249
taude wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there's outliers. But Not all college grads are capable of operating at that level. Which is why companies have a lot of regimented hiring practices and tests to filter out all those not making the cut. I've been on the college recruiting circuit to help my company hire, and I'm often severely disappointed by a good portion of those I meet. There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I t…

From your perspective, what is the issue with a lot of the current college graduates? I'm a college student studying computer science, and I feel like I'd be ready to start work really soon. I'm also the sort of CS student who reads Hackernews, participates in CTFs, maintains a perfect GPA, has side projects, etc.

> has side projects

That's your biggest asset. The perfect GPA will help you get pass the useless HR gatekeepers, a demonstrated ability to build something will mean a lot more to the technical interviewers. Bonus points if those projects happen to use common industry things like an sql database and contains unit tests.

Most graduates, if you sat them down with some fairly simple requirements and said "build this with whatever tech stack you're familiar with" would have no idea where to start.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#252

Post by Ruxbin1986 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #48
Ruxbin1986 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are hundreds of thousands of people or System Administrators that have made life long careers out of managing networks, server farms, windows and linux systems since the early 90s. It's not fancy as software development or drives business value but work that needs to be done. The Cloud greatly diminishes and in some cases completely eliminates that work. The only thing left is actual software development.

If you've tried to hire a good sys admin in North America you'd be shocked at how high their salaries are getting. Amazon is hiring them by the boatload. Shopify is moving to all cloud because they're unable to staff. The problem is that junior sys admins aren't as useful as before to most startups. I still think they'll figure it out, but the industry is changing.

The author is referring to traditional system administration - this is Windows - SCCM, SCOM, Exchange, SharePoint, VMware Virtualization, Citrix, Networking, etc.

SRE or "DevOps" roles new roles that are similar to system administration but the biggest difference is the use of cloud technologies, automation and most importantly those in need to be or at least understand software develop and code.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#253

Post by Ruxbin1986 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #169
TarpitCarnivore wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but nobody there has managed to prevent people from needing the same type of support they needed two decades ago: Why doesn't my printer work, and how do I know if this email is real? The author does touch on this though by highlighting that you will need less and less people. As more services move into 'cloud' solutions it can free up time for those and they'll step into those spaces.

I don't see "less people" as an upcoming IT problem, as most places I look are getting more IT people, as more parts of their business become dependent on computers. I haven't seen any evidence of that changing, and believe it or not, the average business still has plenty of migration to digital means left ahead of them. (Where I work, manual punch card time clocks are still used.)

Look at the cloudification or automation in Windows Products - Windows Updates are pushed through Intune over the internet, Exchange, SharePoint are all through Office 365. Entire On-Premise Datacenters are pushed to Azure.

Yes, someone still needs to manage all of this but you need a lot less people. Or you ship these "trade jobs" to low cost areas like India.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#254

Post by Ruxbin1986 »

BenjaminBlair wrote: post #133

The problem extends outside IT field, as you mentioned factory workers. I think the main problem is that there's no coordinated effort to control inevitable shifts. Workers unions tried protecting workers rights but capitalism clearly won and if there's no profit, you have no securities. IMHO pieces of advice in this article are very good: do not put all eggs in one basket. Don't be afraid to let go of outdated knowl…

Capitalism won and in return we got Trump.

That doesn't sound like winning.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#255

Post by Ruxbin1986 »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #55

Apocalypse, no. A great filter, yea I think so. Comparing to factories shutting down is hyperbolic. It think what we’re about to see is more in line with a a job market that rewards things other than specific application knowledge. However, I can’t say much in defense of the mid-level IT Pro because just this past month I went from considering a server running an OS and MySQL db somewhere that someone would have to m…

Yes, this is old as time but it's just now we've starting eating into positions that with a moderate education investment you could have a decent technical career.

Now that isn't the case. The traditional system admin will need to adapt, but adaption looks like going back to school for software development.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#256

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Ruxbin1986 wrote: post #253
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see "less people" as an upcoming IT problem, as most places I look are getting more IT people, as more parts of their business become dependent on computers. I haven't seen any evidence of that changing, and believe it or not, the average business still has plenty of migration to digital means left ahead of them. (Where I work, manual punch card time clocks are still used.)

Look at the cloudification or automation in Windows Products - Windows Updates are pushed through Intune over the internet, Exchange, SharePoint are all through Office 365. Entire On-Premise Datacenters are pushed to Azure. Yes, someone still needs to manage all of this but you need a lot less people. Or you ship these "trade jobs" to low cost areas like India.

People keep stating "you need less people" with the cloud like its an objective truth, when there's really no evidence of it, and I'd argue its patently false. You end up paying both your own IT and the cloud providers' IT, for a product that also doesn't work when your internet is slow or down.

The main thing moved to the cloud where I work leads us receiving and handling the same number of support tickets as when it was on-prem. The difference is, now some tickets we can't fix, and have to wait for the cloud provider. Service is worse, and it doesn't really save us any time.

A lot of cloud solutions offer an on-prem option. The tools are the same, it's just a matter of it running itself in the building or running itself somewhere else. A lot of times, running something on-prem means spinning up literally the same software you could have them host for you.

(Also: Windows Updates also aren't some crazy painful manual process that Intune fixed. You can just tell WSUS to approve everything automatically if you want, and just as similarly, you can manage Intune more granularly which takes up your IT staff's time and effort.)

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#257

Post by jac_no_k »

Ruxbin1986 wrote: post #36
munin wrote: post #5

This kind of change has also impacted me. It shows up when I'm trying to give students advice about starting their careers, and I realize that the first jobs I had (system administrator, SOC worker) have been replaced by robots. Especially in the SOC, I was a "Tier 1" analyst that would do monitoring (watching a bank of green lights waiting for one to turn red) and first level triage and analysis. This has been repla…

"So I think the apocalypse is double-bladed: while automation kicks a bunch of current workers out by making them immediately redundant, it also freezes out the next generation by removing entry level jobs and not really replacing them with anything equivalent." Agreed entirely. I would be surprised if we still have two-year technical degrees in a decade.

I can't find the article any more but I think Toyota has it's engineers build a handful of cars by hand as part of it's kaizen process. This would act as entry point for next the next generation of engineers.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#259

Post by 0xffff2 »

MRD85 wrote: post #249
taude wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there's outliers. But Not all college grads are capable of operating at that level. Which is why companies have a lot of regimented hiring practices and tests to filter out all those not making the cut. I've been on the college recruiting circuit to help my company hire, and I'm often severely disappointed by a good portion of those I meet. There's occasionally the standout who really impresses me, but then I t…

From your perspective, what is the issue with a lot of the current college graduates? I'm a college student studying computer science, and I feel like I'd be ready to start work really soon. I'm also the sort of CS student who reads Hackernews, participates in CTFs, maintains a perfect GPA, has side projects, etc.

To be a good developer, you have to understand how computers work. You have to understand data structures. When you interview and you're asked to write a breadth-first search, or what the big-O complexity of accessing a hash map is, it's not because the company is going to have you writing your own custom hash maps right out of school. It's because you have to be aware of the general characteristics of the tools you're using to be able to select the right tool for the job.

Most of the students I interview fail miserably at this. They can hack together a working application by copy/pasting from examples and SO posts and making small modifications, but they have no fundamental understanding at all of what the computer is actually doing with the code they write.

Re: The creeping IT apocalypse

#260

Post by adrianN »

thrav wrote: post #23
mark_l_watson wrote: post #3

Nice blog, keep writing. I manage a machine learning team and I also think that at least partially automated data curation and modeling will reduce the number of people required in my field. It might take 5 or 10 years, but I think it will happen. I think you are spot on that IT and devops will take a hit. I look more at Heroku’s model that AWS and GCP as the future. That said AWS and GCP will keep getting more ‘Hero…

Heroku and its parent company, Salesforce. Salesforce databases are code and no code manipulated and should already carry most of the business and customer data and offer several different off the shelf products for plugging other data sources in. For most companies, it could cover the majority of what their legacy IT department does, and for many companies in the Bay Area it handles everything, except their product…

I had some cursory experience with SAP, which is another platform that can do anything. From that I got the impression that while these things are extremely flexible, you're often better off just hiring normal software engineers to write normal software for your problem instead of throwing millions at $PLATFORM expert consultants that know the arcane platform.
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